After getting up way too early, we headed to the local airport to catch our short 1 hour flight to David. It wasn't any problem to reschedule our flight because they seem to run often enough and never are full. I don't know how the high season is though.
David is in a pretty central location for people getting to places around the northwest of Panama. We got our Thrifty rental car and high tailed it up the mountain to Boquete where we checked in to the pension and got some Panamanian food at this restaurant which we would frequent at lease 4 times during the next 3 days. Yes, I am writing this blog in retrospect.
While trying to book some activities, we met up with Jimmy at an outdoor adventures place. Jimmy has been snatching up land in the area since 2003 and now has a nice home and a business and spends most of his days white water rafting and kayaking.
Jim gave us some ideas that the guide book failed to do and our plan was to go to some natural Caldera hot springs and then meet up with a bunch of gringos later that evening to celebrate the 4th.
Finding the springs with directions like go for 5 minutes and then turn left at the big cell phone tower all in a torrential downpour was pretty crappy and then having to hike down a poorly marked rocky road where nobody seemed to be was interesting and slightly discouraging, but we got to the hot springs eventually and really enjoyed it.
The hot springs are the most rustic ones I have been to. While most others are surrounded by swimming pools and man-made waterfalls, this one just had some piled rocks around the entrances of the pools. There were 3 pools of varying temperatures and they were cooled off that day from the rain flood that had just occurred. We relaxed for a couple hours and then talked to the guy who lived on the property about riding some horses back to the car. This guy promised us 3 horses for the ride and delivered 2 horses and a water buffalo. He also was a chatter box and wanted to show us his pet spider monkey named Cheetah. I'll admit that Cheetah was pretty darn cute and we played with him for a while. We also played with the buffalo too and all of us took pictures while sitting on his head. Jen got to ride the buffalo back to the car while Vahbiz and I were on the horses. Jen said that the buffalo was quite sturdy.
When we got to the car, our adventure turned bad. While fumbling with paying the guy for the horses, we ended up locking the keys in the trunk. Here we are, out in the middle of nowhere, and we had no access to the car and the only person around was the dude with a water buffalo.
I got this great idea of jimmying the car door open and it just so happened that the guy had a 2 foot long machete under one of the horses. I worked on machete-ing the car for about a half hour and didn't get very far at all. The guy offered to call a friend for us but he didn't have a phone so he was going to go down the road a bit and find someone who could call. For another hour, I tried to get into the car to no avail. When things looked really bad and it was pretty much pitch dark, we started walking back and our friendly farmer appeared. He chatted our ear off for a half hour more and then some random friends showed up who offered us a ride home. We left the car and headed back but we stopped at the restaurant where the gringos were to see if they could help us. No dice. We got a range of suggestions from pulling the trunk lever inside the car (how clever) to calling Thrifty in the morning. Eventually, a couple of them ended up taking us back to the pension. We were cold and wet and didn't have any money.
We had to knock on the owner's door to ask for more towels because all our stuff was in the car. Someone came out and wanted to get the towels we had locked in the car or charge us money because we lost them. She did part with the towels finally and we went to our room. Just when things seemed to be at their worst, Axel, the owner of the pension knocked at our door, presumably to talk to us about the towels, and wanted to meet us. I told him our sob story, and he was very pleasant and helpful. He said he "knew a guy" and would make a phone call. I wasn't following the whole plan but I was along for the ride. Axel ended up hooking us up with 2 guys that said they would drive us back out to the boonies and get into the car. They were mechanics and had 12 years of experience working on cars. So, all 3 of us were back on the road again and we finally made it to the car after the 2 dudes checked their tools a some gas station. It took about 20 minutes for them to set up the light, pry open the door slightly with 2 screw drivers and a towel, and finagle a coat hanger into a position where they could snag the door lock and pull it open.
All of us cheered with joy when it was done and we were finally able to get out of there. The whole ordeal was painful but didn't last more than 5 hours or cost too much. So much for the fourth of July though.
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